14 Oct Sleep, Creep, Leap: Puppies & your new landscape

Enduring the early years of a new landscape can be trying. It may be akin to having a puppy. The puppy sure is cute, and so are all your new plants, but both take a lot of patience to get them to mature into the enjoyable companion – or space – that made you choose them in the first place.

While the puppy chews up your favorite socks and has accidents on the rug (never the hard floor, right?), the newly planted landscape has more weeds than you’d expected, and some plants shrivel instead of thriving. Alas, it is part and parcel of the tending of living things.

With your landscape, it is helpful to understand the tenets of the adage Sleep, Creep, Leap regarding plant establishment. I know, you’re so excited for your new landscape you just spent considerable time and expense on to boom and bloom, and be a full happy mass of fresh life on the planet! But instead, it sleeps and creeps. Such a challenge for even the most patient of people.  So here’s what’s happening.

Plant establishment relies on the roots of your new plants finding their happy place in the soil and stretching out to find the moisture and nutrients they need to start growing the top part of the plant that you can see. This is the sleeping and creeping part of the equation. In our area, this takes a few years. 3-5 usually. A solid foundation is what puppy training is all about, and you endure it because you know it will pay off. Well, your plants getting well-rooted, so that after a few years they can make beautiful flowers for you and the birds and the bees to enjoy, is no different. Maybe easier. No socks or slippers or rugs need to be sacrificed.

And then, finally, after you’ve been so painfully patient, comes the leaping where the roots have unpacked and made themselves at home, and now the leaves and flowers burst forth and you see your plants growing and flowering, and looking like you imagined it would a few years back when you conceived the idea of your new landscape.

It is in the leaping stage when a landscape designed for living mulch will have plants touching each other at the tips, or overlapping a bit, shading out new weeds from taking root in the soil beneath. This shade produced by your puppies…oh, I mean plants…will also help preserve the moisture in the soil, so each time it rains, or you water, it will last for longer. This leaping stage is when you’ll start to be able to water less and have fewer weeds popping up. 

Woo hoo! Time to let your puppy off the leash and enjoy the reward of all your months of carefully meted out TLC.

Here’s to the glory of the garden ~

Eve Montane

Columbine Landscapes